to enjoy free development. Exquisite--in
illustration of this--the mere interest and amusement of such at once
"creative" and critical questions as how and where and why to make Miss
Gostrey's false connexion carry itself, under a due high polish, as a
real one. Nowhere is it more of an artful expedient for mere
consistency of form, to mention a case, than in the last "scene" of the
book, where its function is to give or to add nothing whatever, but
only to express as vividly as possible certain things quite other than
itself and that are of the already fixed and appointed measure. Since,
however, all art is EXPRESSION, and is thereby vividness, one was to
find the door open here to any amount of delightful dissimulation.
These verily are the refinements and ecstasies of method--amid which,
or certainly under the influence of any exhilarated demonstration of
which, one must keep one's head and not lose one's way. To cultivate
an adequate intelligence for them and to make that sense operative is
positively to find a charm in any produced ambiguity of appearance that
is not by the same stroke, and all helplessly, an ambiguity of sense.
To project imaginatively, for my hero, a relation that has nothing to
do with the matter (the matter of my subject) but has everything to do
with the manner (the manner of my presentation of the same) and yet to
treat it, at close quarters and for fully economic expression's
possible sake, as if it were important and essential--to do that sort
of thing and yet muddle nothing may easily become, as one goes, a
signally attaching proposition; even though it all remains but part and
parcel, I hasten to recognise, of the merely general and related
question of expressional curiosity and expressional decency.

I am moved to add after so much insistence on the scenic side of my
labour that I have found the steps of re-perusal almost as much waylaid
here by quite another style of effort in the same signal interest--or
have in other words not failed to note how, even so associated and so
discriminated, the finest proprieties and charms of the non-scenic may,
under the right hand for them, still keep their intelligibility and
assert their office. Infinitely suggestive such an observation as this
last on the whole delightful head, where representation is concerned,
of possible variety, of effective expressional change and contrast. One
would like, at such an hour as this, for critical licence, to go